Raspberry Pi-based smart platform for data

acquisition, supervision and management of a

hybrid PV/WT/Batteries system
*Note: Sub-titles are not captured in Xplore and should not be used

Skander Lazgheb Bacem Bayar Malek Belouda

University of Carthage, The Higher University of Carthage, The Higher University of Carthage, The Higher
Institute of Information Technologies Institute of Information Technologies Institute of Information Technologies
and Communication ISTIC and Communication ISTIC and Communication ISTIC
Ben Arous, Tunisia Ben Arous, Tunisia Ben Arous, Tunisia
Energetic Efficiency and Renewable
lazghabskander@gmail.com bacembayar9@gmail.com Energies Application Laboratory
(LAPER), Faculty of Sciences of Tunis,
Hatem Oueslati Salah Ben Mabrouk University of Tunis El Manar Farhat
line 2: Thermal Processes Laboratory Thermal Processes Laboratory Hached University Campus, 1068
Research and Technology Center of Research and Technology Center of Tunis, Tunisia
Energy (CRTEn) Po. Box 95, 2050 Energy (CRTEn) Po. Box 95, 2050 malek.belouda@gmail.com
Hammam-Lif, Tunisia Hammam-Lif, Tunisia
Ben Arous, Tunisia Ben Arous, Tunisia
houeslati@gmail.com salah.benmabrouk@crten.rnrt.tn

Abstract— Renewable energy production is not continuous
and reliant on climatic conditions as well as geographical
location. Deal with the problem of intermittency of renewable
energy sources have emerged as the biggest interests of the last
decade. To overcome the issues inserting batteries to these
renewable energy sources is seen as an attractive option. Such
energy systems may simultaneously tackle the concerns
regarding climate change, energy security, optimal design, and
problems related to the battery bank. The present paper
proposes the development of a Raspberry Pi-based hardware
platform for data acquisition, supervision and energy
management of a hybrid PV/WT/Batteries system. It may be
speculated that integrating smart technologies in the renewable
energy sector into a single hybrid energy system, coupled
through informatics linkages, would enable to overcome the
drawbacks inherent in the intermittent nature of these energy
sources.
Keywords—Renewable energy, supervision,
management, data acquisition, Raspberry Pi
I. INTRODUCTION
Renewable energies are clean and safe energies that
produce no or few pollutants and are almost inexhaustible.
The use of renewable energies allows the reduction of CO2
production in comparison with the non-renewable energies
they replace. However, they account for only 16% to 20% of
total gross energy consumption [1,2]. To promote this sector,
several scientific skills overlap for the design, control and
management of these energies. This work deals with the
problems related to the management, data acquisition and
supervision of renewable energy systems. Several works
have been carried out in the field of renewable energies with
the major objective being to synthetize renewable energy
management strategies in order to make these systems most
reliable and to face their intermittent and random nature.
Therefore, techniques of acquiring meteorological data and
the supervision of these systems can be adequate solutions to
avoid these problems. A large part of these earlier works are
based on three fundamental axes: modeling and design of
these systems, conversion of the form of energy and
management [3-5]. In the literature, several works have dealt
with the problem of management, acquisition and
supervision of electrical energy produced by renewable
energy systems particularly for supplying remote sites.
Some work has focused on the implementation of
different energy management strategies based on various
programmable targets. [6] has opted for the measurement
and control of electrical energy (in kWh) by means of a
microcontroller type "AT89C2051/ADE7757". [7] has
preferred to efficiently manage the electric load utilities and
photovoltaic generated power. System design architecture is
put in place by the design of a management center consisting
of an electrical energy management center called (EMC:
Energy Management Center) and a network of Field
Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). In [8], another
alternative based on a Raspberry Pi as a system key
energy
component to monitor environmental parameters, namely
temperature, barometric pressure humidity, irradiation, etc.,
as well as to monitor electrical consumption of the building
environment in order to develop an effective environmental
monitoring system that can be used appropriately for data
analysis and data collection. The work carried out in [9]
adopted the objective of implementing, testing, diagnosing
and monitoring a Renewable Energy Monitoring System
(REMS). Based on this practical experience the purpose of
this work was focused on a remote multi-user system using
the concept based on Raspberry Pi and the Internet Of
Things (IOT). The objectives expected in this work are: the
Implementation of an energy management strategy of a
hybrid PV/WT/Batteries system installed at CRTEn Borj
Cedria, a real-time acquisition of energy data from the
converters associated with the system components (SMA
inverters), supervision of all energy data on a real-time web
interface and error detection of the photovoltaic system.
These objectives will guarantee the supply of the required
electrical energy in a given remote area, producing the
maximum energy from renewable resources while
maintaining a well-defined acceptable quality of energy

978-1-7281-4064-3/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE

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supplied and a real-time exploitation based on availability
and economy criteria through an implementation of a
resource management technique using a Raspberry Pi.
II. HYBRID PV/WT/BT SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
A. Hybrid PV/WT/BT system architecture
In the Thermal Processes Laboratory "LPT" part of
CRTEn Borj-Cedria, there is a hybrid power plant:
Photovoltaic/Wind Turbine/Battery system (PV/WT/BT),
which combines two sources of renewable energies (wind
turbine , photovoltaic panels) with electrochemical storage
(batteries). and whose management of the energy of the
different sources is ensured by a manager who controls the
switches status (ON/OFF) of the renewable sources,
according to the meteorological conditions (irradiation, wind
speed and State Of Charge (SOC) of the battery pack.
This system is composed of:
• A photovoltaic installation of 12 KWc
• A micro-wind turbine with 1 KWc of power +
inverter
• 1 Inverter connected to SMA network SUNNY
TRIPOWER 12000TL.
• 3 SMA SUNNY ISLAND 6.0H SMA Inverters
for Isolated Site.
• Battery storage system
• Main elements of the Control Room: an
electrical cabinet for monitoring and a cabinet
for monitoring + protection boxes for two
installations
A photo extracted from the control room of the hybrid
PV/WT/BT system subject of this study and the synoptic of
its architecture are presented by the two following figures.
(Fig.1 and Fig.2).
Fig. 1. Hybrid PV/WT/BT control room
Fig. 2. Hybrid PV/WT/BT system architecture
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Fig. 3. PV/WT/BT l energy management strategy.
B. Hybrid PV/WT/BT energy management strategy
In this section we propose to present an energy
management strategy of the described PV/WT/BT system.
The main problem in energy management is to be able to
supply the power required by the load despite the large
variations in the energy produced. The variations in the
production of energies are caused by the intermittent nature
of the renewable resources In the system management, the
priority is given to the value of the SOC of the battery,
because from this value we write the different scenarios of
the strategy. For energy management, first has acquired all
the essential data. The flow chart of the management
strategy is given below:
• Scenario 1 (SOC> SOCMax):
Pgen = PPV + PWind will be calculated. If Pgen is greater
than the Pload the system will switch to the energy evacuation
task (Dump load). If not Pgen will be Pgen = PPV + PWind+PBT :
If Pgen> Pload the battery will be charged. Otherwise we access
another solution LPS (Loss of Power Supply) [3].
• Scenario 2 (SOCmin <Soc< SOCMax):
• Scenario 3 (SOC <SOCmin):
If Soc is lower than Socmin then the system will
disconnect the battery
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
A. Data acquisition
1) Embedded solution for the energetic data acquisition
For the acquisition of energetic data (system status data
and meteorological data), it was proposed to use a raspberry
pi 2 card to be the core of the control system of the hybrid
PV/WT/BT system. The synoptic of the adopted material
architecture is illustrated by the following figure. More,. a
Bluetooth communication protocol was used to establish the
connection between the raspberry pi board and the SMA TRI
Power inverter of the photovoltaic station. Finally, for the
acquisition of metrological values, the CR1000 acquisition
card is connected with raspberry pi 2 via an RS232-USB
adapter.

Fig. 5. Energetic data acquisition from CR1000

B. Supervision
In this section, we are interested in the discovery of
Fig. 4. Embedded solution for the energetic data acquisition
sequence diagrams of the web interface and the different
pages of our web application. In the identification phase, the
2) Acquisition of energetic data from SMA TRIPOWER user must enter their login and password to access Web
Server in order to enter different web interfaces of our site.
This operation is performed by a Python script, which The following figure shows the sequence to be completed to
makes it possible to make Bluetooth connection between begin the identification phase. We have developed two
Raspberry Pi and the SMA-Tri Power inverter. When the interfaces: "Day" and "month", from our web application as
Raspberry pi is picked up from SMA, the requested inverter shown in the figure below, this interface contains:
authentication, the user must enter his username and A table: contains the current active power value and the
password. If the identification is correct. The Raspberry PI total active power
card starts acquiring energy data every 5 minutes and saving
it to a SQLite database. A calendar: to choose the day / month or the user wants
to see the values of Active Power
the SQLite database assembles several parameters:
A curve: Active Power curve per day / month
- Pdc1, Pdc2, Pdc3: Continuous power of three lines
- Pac1, Pac2, Pac3: AC power of three lines
- Lac1, Lac2, Lac3: AC current of three lines
- Udc1, Udc2, Udc3: continuous voltage of three lines
- Uac1, Uac2, Uac3: three-line AC voltage
- Temperature: value of the temperature
- EToday: Energy Per day
- ETotal: Total Energy
- Frequency: sampling frequency
Fig. 6. “day” Interface
3) Energetic data acquisition from CR1000
With the connection between the Raspberry pi 2 card and
the acquisition chain cr100 by the RS232-USB adapter, it
was possible to extract the metrological data record for every
15 minutes from the "Pycampbell_CR100" lagoon library.
Python. This extraction will be saved in a CSV file
The metrological data backup on the csv file are:
- T109_c: Temperature sensed by the probe 109
- SlrKW: the power of solar radiation captured by
pyrometer CMP6
- WindDir: Air Direction
- WS_ms: air speed in milliseconds Fig. 7. “month” Interface
- Battv: default CR1000 voltage
C. Implementation of the management strategy
- BP mbar: the barometric pressure draws by CS100 To verify the correct operation of the energy management
Barometer strategy from the PV / WT / BT system, a Raspberry Pi

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board-based was adopted. A test plate with 4 LEDs IV. CONCLUSION
simulating the states of various components of the system. . Currently, using smart technologies e.g. Rasberry Pi …
Each LED corresponds to a specific case as follows: in renewable energy management, meteorological data
• Yellow LED: Energy evacuation (dump load) acquisition and supervision is unvoidable. Real-time
monitoring will reduce the risk of intermitent features of
• RED LED: When to charge the battery these energy sources. Traditional methods for renewable
• GREEN LED: Case of Other Solution (LPS) energy monotoring monitoring are being replaced by IOT
monitoring. In this paper, the development of a Raspberry Pi-
• WHITE LED: Disconnect the battery based smart platform for data acquisition, supervision and
management of a hybrid PV/WT/Batteries system is
the material architecture adopted is illustrated by the presented. The proposed system consists of a Raspberry Pi
following figure: board integrated with a hybrid PV/WT/BT system. The
proposed system is low-cost and a software panel is also
developed for the interactive user interface. The developed
user interface can help the end user to operate the system
efficiently and make decisions based on the result displayed.
In the future we plan to implement the system enabled
with the internet of things (IoT) for online hybrid
PV/WT/BT system monitoring.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
• This work was supported by the Tunisian Ministry of
High Education, Research and Technology.
• The Project has been funded by Programme Instrument
Européen de Voisinage et de Partenariat (IEVP),
Coopération Transfrontalière (CT) Italie-Tunisie 2007-
2013 - 2PS2.3.005 CUP:C17D13000000006 - Projet
Fig. 8. Material architecture adopted to the energy management cofinancé par l’Union européenne- Programme ENPI.
strategy The authors thank very much scientific and technical
team from the DEDUENERT Project and The AGC
the implementation validity of the energy management (Palermo) financial support.
strategy of the PV/WT is illustrated by some results of the
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